The Record: Fighting hunger

THE Action Against Hunger Food Drive is today. Donations will be accepted from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. at more than 100 locations throughout northern New Jersey, from supermarkets to churches, food pantries to borough halls.

This is the 21st year of the drive, which is organized by the North Jersey Media Foundation, the charitable arm of The Record and the Herald News.

For two decades, North Jersey residents who don’t have enough money to buy food have benefitted from the generosity of those who do. If only hunger dwindled with each passing year, the Action Against Hunger Food Drive could wind down and eventually go out of business. We wish it worked like that, but unfortunately poverty is tied to market forces, not to donations.

The economy naturally fluctuates. When it teeters and falls flat, when companies shed jobs and state and federal programs fall victim to budget cuts, more and more people don’t have enough to eat. Things get better when the economic engine revs up, but this most recent recession and molasses-slow recovery have left thousands of devastated families in their wake. The state unemployment rate for August remained a hauntingly high 9.9 percent. Food pantries can’t possibly fill grocery bags fast enough.

And so we get numbers like this, from Feeding America, a domestic-relief charity: 13.5 percent — that’s 1.2 million — of New Jersey’s residents go hungry at some point during the year. Nearly one-fifth of the state’s children, or more than 380,000, are in the same boat. A job — or two or three — does not prevent hunger from creeping into a house. Low-wage jobs stretch only so far and a family may often be faced with deciding between paying the mortgage and buying food, paying off medical bills and affording car insurance.